Orientation

Ello.

Not sure what your problem is but it is normally really simple…

HardCMP does NOT load the ship model oriented, so don’t worry about how it looks in HardCMP, it’s just a viewer. It does show hardpoint to ship orientation properly, so when you make a new hardpoint you will see. When you look at hardpoints already in the model they may be squished, this is a bug in HardCMP. HardCMP v23 shows the axes for hardpoints, so use this if it works for your graphics card - it only works on one of my PCs and I have to use HardCMP v18 for the others.

1 unit is a huge amount, in my scale this is about 1 metre, so maybe this is your problem? Try 0.1 or 0.01 or even 0.001

To orient your ship model - In Milkshape just point your ship’s nose straight up when looking in the top view port (bottom-left pane). Then get its centre on the centre line by making small RELATIVE movements (0.1 or 0.01) left or right.

Get it straight and level by looking and adjusting in the front (top-left pane) and left (top-right pane) viewpanes.

Select the whole model and just apply small rotations and/or movements in each view until it is correctly levelled in all directions.

And always be sure you select all ship model parts, and center the ship on the origin (X=0, Y=0, Z=0) without selecting any hardpoints if you have any because they may offset the ship model. Then when the ship is centred you can move each of the hardpoints to the right locations again.

When you export, be sure to click on back-to-front. I’ve never used upside-down and I can’t see why the earlier tutorials told us to do that. Some of the sur files in plain FL are upside down relative to their ships and this is wrong.

The textures (i.e. the ship paint jobs if you don’t know what textures are) have to be upside-down relative to the model if you use .tga format textures, but if you use .dds format textures then they must be right way up. On DDS format - only PhotoShop’s nVidia DDS plugin is correct, others I have used (GIMP, PAINT.NET) produce bad dds textures and the only way to get confident dds from these is to export them (right way up) as .tga and then convert them using DDSConverter2.

Make sure your model export scaling is 1 unless you have made it bigger to work on it. You MUST Save or Reload the exporter scale settings or else the exporter will still scale down 92%, because there is a bug in it.

To get my ship scale right relative to plain FL ships I always import a basic FL ship like the Dagger into my ship at the same time, group it as one group and use that for scaling my ships to the same scale, and importing the pilot model and putting him into my ship’s cockpit makes it more obvious too.

I use 1 Milkshape unit as 1 metre and it seems about right.

That’s it.